A founder from Deeky Ventures calls both customers and rejected prospects to ask why they chose differently. Those conversations revealed they saw Deeky as an investor, not a co-founder, so the team rebuilt their website to emphasize hands-on support and repositioned the offer for the first year. The practice works because people tell you what you can't see yourself.
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Something we've tried recently that's made a massive difference to Deeky Ventures, and which we're communicating to the founders of our portfolio companies, is something— it's very easy, but it's something that maybe you should consider doing as well if you haven't done it already. And that is quite simply calling your customers, and just as importantly, calling people who almost became customers but didn't. We've just done this. It's been an amazingly eye-opening exercise, and we've just asked them a few questions. What was their situation when they found Deque Ventures? What made them apply to us? What made them inquire? Once they worked with us, or once they went through our application process, how was the reality versus their expectation? What could we improve? And thirdly, how would they describe Deke Ventures to someone that they know? So we have taken the learnings from those calls and we've implemented them on our website. And before I show you the, the changes that we've made, why are we considering our website really important? So there's a guy called Rand Fishkin who you may follow here on LinkedIn. Who I really admire, and he has recently released a post explaining why you should be investing in your website. He gives 4 main reasons for this. The first one is that your website is the home base for your content. It's where all of your content should exist. If someone's trying to find something about your company, that's where they should find it. What many of you have probably seen is AI is building an impression of your company. So if you want to inform AI about what you do and what you don't do, your website should be where AI can find that information. I've just literally just been updating some outdated blog posts that we posted years ago when Deeky Ventures looked quite different to how it looks now. I've updated those posts so that AI doesn't get misinformed about how we work. And finally, Ran says that Your website is where you control your brand experience and where you convert interested customers from observers into actual paying customers. So he and I also think that your website's really important, and that's why we're spending time and money updating ours. So what did we learn from our calls? Well, we learned an awful lot, but 3 major takeaways. Rather than calling ourselves an investor, which we have done traditionally because we do invest money in helping founders to start their companies, we are calling ourselves a co-founder. The core message of our business is start a business before you quit your job, but how we do that is much more as a co-founder. We're your co-founder for the first 12 months of your business, and then we transition into a long-term business partner for the remainder of your journey, all the way through to exit. So, if you look through our website, you're going to see that kind of language on our website, and you're going to see that communicated more and more. The second thing that people told us is that they loved the human touch, that we're very much in the business with them. We're not just advising them, but we're in the trenches. So, they liked our humanity and the warmth and the style with which we support them. So, you'll see on our website, you'll see a lot more pictures, you'll see a lot more imagery, you'll see videos of us and our co-founders, explaining what we do. People also asked us what we get when they work with us, and we realized that we hadn't done a particularly good job of communicating what we actually do. So we've filled our new website with lots of detail about how we work, what it involves in starting a business, what's a typical startup journey. So you've got videos like this one that shows exactly what we did for one of our founders. So giving potential new co-founders that we're going to start a business with a lot more examples of what we might do with them, interviews with people who are— who have been down a similar path, and hopefully informing those people and giving them much more information about what they're going to get. So that's what we got out of our calls. Hopefully you can do some yourself and you'll learn as much as we did about our business about yours. Good luck.
